I understand what happens with ties (in the long term, the longest chain wins), however, if a majority of miners start with a nonce of zero, does it just matter who has the fastest hardware, or is lucky enough to have a lower latency connection to a node?
Would it be better to start at a different nonce?
The block templates of two different miners will never overlap.
Miners get paid by assigning the block reward in their mined blocks to themselves. Since each miner is trying to credit a different address, their coinbase transactions, the generating transactions, will differ. If the transaction set differs even in one transaction, it'll result in a different merkle root in the block header. Therefore, even if they use the same nonces, they'll be searching different block headers and never repeat work another miner has done before.
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